


In Captivity

by CynaraM



Category: Johannes Cabal - Jonathan L. Howard
Genre: Angst, Comfort/Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Humour, Minor Character Death, PWP, Resolved Sexual Tension, Sexual Content, Sexual Tension, Sexy Angst, Shameless Smut, Smut, angsty sex, as in character as I could make it, my inner fangirl is writing, somewhat out of character, this cannot end well
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-10
Updated: 2015-04-10
Packaged: 2018-03-22 03:57:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3714061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CynaraM/pseuds/CynaraM
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Having written one lighthearted out-of-character sexy Cabal/Leonie short, somehow I wrote a second one that played out some of the more realistically angsty possibilities, which also involved more sex.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Captivity

**Author's Note:**

> Don't look at me. I'm just an innocent pastiche writer for a YA series.

For two days they had been captives. Well, their captor thought so, and they would not disabuse him until the time was right. It was, to be sure, a very pleasant prison; Cabal thought they might be guest quarters for the sorts of people who keep their friends close and their enemies in well-appointed rooms with-ensuite-and-reinforced-doors. The guards had made the circuit in rather less time than expected. Cabal blamed their desire to get back to the guardhouse. His estimates of their rounds and his timekeeping were not, of course, at fault.

Cabal sat at the Louis-Quatorze desk and frowned, as was his custom. He shifted uncomfortably, which was not. 

Leonie sat cross-legged on the bed and wondered if Cabal knew he had been throwing looks of raw sexual heat at her all morning. She rather thought he didn't. Firstly, it would be very unlike him. He was a contained man (which, upon occasion, had made her want to uncontain him deliberately), and furthermore, a direct one. Secondly, intentional advances generally involved less scowling. Her diagnosis was that Cabal was a) bored, b) terrifically wound up, and c) conflicted.

“Pardon me. I’m going to bathe.” He moved to the bathroom with something less than his usual efficient grace.

...

Three minutes later she opened the door to the spacious, marble-tiled bathroom. Cabal was standing in the shower, his forehead pressed against the wall, motionless. He was a pale, elegant silhouette against the dark tile, the water darkening his hair to honey and tracing down his back in rivulets.

He didn’t hear her coming over the sound of the water and his internal monologue. 

A noise startled him into moving (and, briefly, assessing the surroundings for potential means of self-defence; bar of soap? Bottle of shampoo? Unpromising.) It took very little to overcome his resistance - her appearance had been like a wish fulfilled. She moved into him and pressed him firmly between her and the wall. He had already been hard. He pulled her close against him, and was briefly confused when she sank slowly down his body and brushed her lips against his suddenly straining erection. 

**  
The water soaked her blouse to her skin, and her slip draped her thighs wetly. He wanted to push it up with his hand. He wanted her on her back, in a pile of those towels. He wanted her bent over the marble countertop. He wanted her just where she was, on her knees in front of him, playing at obedience with fire in her eyes. 

The first time, he had been swept up, surprised, someone else. This time he knew. He had seen something in her face this afternoon, something that said this wasn't finished, wasn't back to normal. This time, he knew. And he wanted it so badly he didn't care. Angrily, he closed out all the habits and voices of restraint that would have given him words to turn her away. He met her eyes and let the lust show, all of it, his approval of her wet clothes, he way her lips tightening around him threatened to steal his balance, the desire and loneliness denied for years, and she ran her nails over him and he couldn’t keep his eyes open anymore. 

She was slow, so slow that he couldn’t stop his small, desperate movements against her mouth, and she smiled against him and started a slow, slow build in speed and pressure and the deliberate wet movement of her tongue against his cock, and little touches of her hand until slowly everything went white and his nervous system turned into a column of fire that blasted his mind to ash and left nothing in the world but her and her and her. 

He had no idea how much time had passed when she gently removed his clawed hands from her shoulders, stood, put a hand to the back of his neck and kissed him deeply before taking a towel and leaving him there, the water running through the drain, and him still gasping and uncertain on his feet.  
  
....

It was perhaps two and a half minutes later when Cabal rejoined her. She had stripped out of the wet clothes, towelled off, and changed into a bathrobe, and he - well, he was a disaster in progress.

"What have you done to me." His voice broke, rage in every syllable, followed by a stream of broken German curses. He threw a glass at the wall so hard it powdered when it hit.

A glib reply was in Leonie's mind, but she didn't say it. Instead, she sighed inwardly. She should have expected this, really. She had been deliciously surprised by Cabal's wholehearted participation, but nothing was ever simple with him. And now he was hurting.

"I didn't make you do anything, Cabal." She folded her towel. "And I certainly didn’t do it to upset you." He was still naked, kneeling on the rug as he tried to master himself. She knelt by him. "Did you think you would stay faithful to a dead woman forever?"

"Yes. Forever. Forever, damn you, that was what we promised, and that's how it should have been. She would never...."

"Really. Never?"

"Of course." His eyelashes were darker wet, and his hair hung in damp locks. Even now, he looked edible. 

"Even if she had been alone for ten, twelve, fourteen, twenty years? Is that what you would have wanted for her? Locked up alone, caged in her lab, never touching anyone, not even having a friend? I've called you a monster, but I don't think you're capable of wishing that on someone you love. And if she wanted that for you, I say to hell with her." Leonie's voice broke on the last words, and she realized she was leaning forward, about to put a hand on his bare, sculpted shoulder. She put it on the floor instead. "You love her. Then love her. Persist in your work. But there isn't room for anything else, ever?"

“It’s not about what she would have wanted. It is what I wanted." 

"Now there's a surprise." Leonie stood. "Then get back on the wagon, Cabal. Believe me, I can stop if you can."

The rest of the evening was excruciating. He apparently made notes. She pretended to read. Looking at him, her mind returned relentlessly to their first encounter: his lean hips between her thighs, the thin, well-formed lips she wanted everywhere on her, the softness of his hair at the nape, the almost tender way he had.... Damn, now she was staring at him. Look away, Barrow! 

Cabal had raised his eyes from his notebook and was frowning at her like a Scots schoolmaster. She had a sudden flash of him in the shower, arrogant head thrown back, lost to everything but lust, one hand splayed on the tile, the other closed convulsively on her shoulder. He had whispered “ _ach_ ” as she.... 

She yawned to cover her uneven breathing. "Pardon me. I'm going to bathe." And she swiped her towel from over the door and stalked into the bathroom. Her lengthy bath was uninterrupted, and when she emerged Cabal had already retired. 

She sat up in the parlour, reading and writing and finally getting her mind off the unlikely object of her desires. By the time she was ready to retire she had realized that this was, really, for the best. And perhaps she should meet some nice young men. Dark-haired ones.

As she passed the locked door to the hallway, she found an envelope slid under it. Who knows how long it had been there; the exterior door was closest to her room, and she hadn't passed it since the morning. She wouldn't wake Cabal. He was probably sleeping with a hand on his switchblade in case she threw herself at him. Tomorrow, perhaps one of them would apologise. And undead pigs might fly. She had a half-smile as she opened the envelope that would end a chapter of her life.

....

Cabal awoke to find her in his door, wavering back and forth like a woman who cannot see her way forward or back.

Still lying down, he snatched the blanket to his bare chest. "Miss Barrow," he began icily, prepared to be furious.

"Dad's dead." 

Cabal was entirely thrown. “Your father… I'm sorry.” A pause opened up. “Truly."

"I have to go back and take care of things. I have to tell my great-aunt, and talk to the vicar, and....” Her throat closed, but she didn’t sob. "And I'd really rather not. I can't, because if I do, the sorcerer will...."

"Yes."

"And I don't know what I'm going to do without him, I just...." She trailed off and her cheeks were wet.

"I know." And perhaps he reached towards her, or perhaps she stepped towards him, but she was in his arms, on the bed, warm with her tears and moving her little hands down his naked chest and he remembered dimly he wasn't supposed to take advantage - unless she was the one taking advantage - and then he pushed the thoughts away. He could see the bruises he’d left on her shoulders earlier. She had come to him, and she was in grief, and once they had come this far, only one thing could happen. Her tears were so sweet on her lips, and they were alone and left incomplete together. Somehow, he wondered if he was losing his soul.

In a tumble of limbs and sheets and Leonie was pinned down to the bed gently by one clever hand, and the other traced delicately between her legs; she was wet, soaking wet. Despite their scene earlier, despite or because of her grief, she wanted him again. He lay beside her and traced over her inner flesh until it felt like his fingers were trailing fire over her and she begged incoherently into the hollow of his neck. 

Finally she won him over or he exceeded his control, because he was above her, teeth bared in the dark, and she could have cried out with relief when he sank into her, stretching her, giving her the weight and friction she was dying for. He gasped some words she couldn’t understand, but were certainly addressed to her. She wrapped her legs around him and he gasped again and rocked slowly and fiercely into her, still stroking her, until the world was blotted out in a blinding haze of pleasure. 

She was aware, again, of the softness of the sheets and the depth of the bed - of the maddening man above her - of her own, irreplaceable loss. Immediately after Leonie Barrow had possibly the most perfect orgasm of her life, she immediately burst into tears. She didn’t cry because of Cabal - though, she admitted, this day had taken one of the more complicated areas of her life and made it ten times as disastrous. 

And a blond man named Johannes fell to her side and held her close as she wept on him and he kissed her forehead and brushed her hair back and said soft, meaningless things in German. 

Her eye fell on the death’s-head cane propped in the corner, next to the Gladstone bag; nothing was ever going to be the same. And in the morning, surely everything would be over.


End file.
